


these friendly beasts (the gifts they gave)

by Victoryindeath2



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [336]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Again, Everyone Needs A Hug, Everyone Needs Therapy, First Christmas, Gen, Kittens, Mithrim, Sticks is tetchy and dear and done with several people, flashbacks to Formenos days, it is Christmas once again, kittens are important, love mingled with grief, more or less smol children dealing with grief and misunderstandings, sort of because Sticks does not really remember a good Christmas, this is Amras' first Christmas without his twin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:34:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28080231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victoryindeath2/pseuds/Victoryindeath2
Summary: On a Christmas night in Mithrim, Amras feels very alone. Sticks has her own difficulties.
Relationships: Amras & Amrod (Tolkien), Amras & Sons of Fëanor, Amras (Tolkien) & Original Female Character(s)
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [336]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22





	these friendly beasts (the gifts they gave)

_Amras sits by the lake and a lantern and rolls a handful of ragged stones between his palms. If he presses firmly, the edges cut across the creases in his skin._

_If he lets them fall, however, the stones plink to the ground where they rest in grave silence, as if they had never been stirred from there at all, never been dug up by a crying boy’s blunt fingernails._

_He sighs. No one hears him, save for the fine-limbed doe drinking the black lake water a dozen yards down the shoreline. Her delicate silhouette flinches away from him, as she were a small child pricked by a needle, but when he holds his breath and feigns disinterest, she returns to the water, betraying her wariness only with the flick of a shadow ear._

_Amras has very good sight, for what is in front of him. When it comes to the future, however, he may as well search for a tiny gold button in a barrel of grain._

_(Actually, he didn’t think there_ would _be one—a golden button. Not until Fingon saved Maitimo.)_

_It is Christmas night. Mithrim is celebrating whatever they can—survival, warm clothes, the tenuous alliances that have yet to be broken by incautious word or untethered anger._

_Amras has tried to keep a steady smile. Went to the feast and everything, but he could not stay. Not all his brothers had been saved. Amrod—Amrod had had no Fingon, only brothers who could not stop his departure nor ensure his return, seated on a spent horse in front of them, wrapped in their arms._

_Amras draws tightly in upon himself, hugging his knees. If they had all gone together, leaving not a soul behind, maybe they would have found—_

_If only he had—_

Do you remember the Christmases we used to have at home?

_Amras tosses one of the stones into the water. It sinks straight away, and the voice is quiet. The doe, frustrated in her broken peace, flicks her tail at him and bounds away._

_Amras almost calls after her, warning her not to return to a fort so hungry for morrows, but the distant sound of people mingling very poorly in song reaches his ears._

_At least Maglor has yet to take up his musical ways again. Amras couldn’t bear that, not tonight. When he had bit into Caranthir’s Christmas bread, it had turned into memory in his mouth. He scarce could choke it down, and had run from the hall, lest he begin weeping at the table._

_It would not do for fragile Maitimo to see him thus, or Celegorm either. Most of all, said the part in him that liked to pretend it was wiser than all the rest, you are almost full-grown._

_It would not do to sob into his potatoes, not with the Frog boy nearby, and the sharp-eyed, feisty sandpiper of a girl named Sticks._

_Oh no, the last thing he needs is for Sticks to rag on him._

-

Little Red can’t abide her anymore, that’s the certain sight of things.

(“Bad cess to him,” Sticks grumbles as she tears a crooked carrot from the garden earth. The sun hangs noon-high above, irksome in its slant of light.)

She has wrinkled her nose at Amras more than once since their first meeting, but when he had so deliberately given the naming of the kittens to her (and Frog), she had warmed to him just as though she were a stone set in a little wall close round a firepit.

A boy—twig though he might be—who could cradle a kitten in the palm of his hand and pass it ever so gently over to her, he couldn’t be all no-account. Sticks was close to friendly with him after that, didn’t raise her hackles at him every time they spoke. Felt a penny of sorry for him too, the way he was shaved down a layer of bark, nicked by the knife of grief.

Oh yes, Sticks can tell. It ain’t hard to read eyes, even if she can’t read her letters.

She’d heard rumor, of what’s been lost. She’d taken care to be _kind_ , then, as best she knew.

Well. T’was all for naught, because Amras won’t spare hardly a moment for her anymore, let alone a passing word. Sticks is galled, to think how he has acted these past few days. She isn’t a baby like Frog—she should not be ignored like one. Russandol would _never_.

Sticks, her pride turned over and charred on all sides, resolves that she will call Amras _only_ Little Red with all emphasis on _Little_ , no matter the fact that he is but a few inches shy of his eldest brother.

No matter the fact! Sticks dumps an apron’s bounty of carrots and dirt into a large wooden pail waiting at the edge of the garden and wrenches the faded cloth strings from around her neck. The apron flutters to the ground next to the bucket, resting there like a patch of fallen crosshatched midday sky.

It won’t be fair if Little Red grows as tall as Russandol—no one should be as tall as him as no one can ever be as good as him.

Sticks stomps down to the barn, hardened in her heart, swinging her arms back and forth with more vim than carelessness. She pulls one door open and enters, carrying in with her a lazy winter draft, and Amras leaps up from the straw and a topple of circling, tripping kittens.

Pieces of straw cling to his sleeves and trousers, and there is a dark smudge on his nose that gives him a mite funny look, but Sticks manages to preserve her frown.

Amras’s mouth opens and closes very quickly, and he grasps something small in one hand, something kind of brownish and angular. Sticks cannot make it out before he flings a dark green handkerchief over it. He snatches up a short knife lying in the straw just by his boot and mumbles a goodbye before hurrying for the barn door and somewhere-Sticks-isn’t.

“What’s got you running all sudden-like?” Sticks asks even though she had resolved not to talk to him if the trouble of yesterday occurred all over again. Tig-Pig—what a name!—trots over and digs his little claws into her soft, Beren-stitched shoes and hoists himself up and around her ankles.

Amras looks over his shoulder and shrugs awkwardly, shifting the cloth-covered mystery from one hand to the other. “Chores,” he says, that single word only.

“What chores?” Sticks digs her grimy fingernails into her palms, because yesterday he didn’t want to sit with her and the kittens either, had said he needed to visit Russandol, but she spied him sneaking down to the lake instead, walking round, and settling himself on the other side of a twisted, sickly juniper tree.

The hard ground couldn’t have been comfortable, but there he remained long past reason.

Sticks doesn’t like being lied to—if Amras had wanted to be alone he could have just said. 

“What chores?” she repeats, because Amras is pushing the door open without answering. It isn’t hard to pour disgust into her words and up-turned glare. She has a rather fearsome brow—Celegorm informed her of that. “Do you actually do anything ‘sides petting kittens and talking to the Mollie-girl? You don’t spend half your time hunting, like your lion brother, and if I were to stand you next to Russandol—”

Sticks halts there, because she’s wounding herself, but also because Amras, cut in twain by the half-light of winter sun and covered barn, hunches his shoulders over for just one moment, the spitting image of Russandol when he’s trying to hide his sad and fright.

Then Amras straightens, turns his whole self toward Sticks, and it really chafes her how tall he is, and is like to be. On top of that, he’s healthy and whole. It isn’t _fair_ , nothing is _fair_ —

“I’m not Celegorm or Maitimo or any of my brothers,” he says, too calm-like for the rate his eyes blink. “I’m just me, and—and in Mithrim I have obligations I must see to.”

He leaves the barn, troubled in his gait but sneaky in his backward glance, and Sticks is all a-roiled inside, exactly like the yellowish stormclouds that everyone always prays to see the back of, even if they been hoping for rain for weeks or months.

“I have ob’lations,” Sticks mutters to herself, kicking straw until the mewing kittens give her something else to agonize over.

She sits and lets newly named Thomas lick at her thumb, scraping the garden off with his wet bristle tongue, and she considers again what Estrela hinted, that Amras—Little Red—was not always youngest, not always a _just me_.

She doesn’t need to be friends with him, maybe doesn’t want to anyway, but she also doesn’t want him swallowing bile, rustling the hurt in his gut like burnt, wind-tossed ash, just because she spiced her scolding with bitterness.

“Spot,” she says, picking up a fragile-ribbed kitten with the most interesting arrangement of black, white, and orange splotches. “Spot, mebbe Frog has got his points, not talking much. Mebbe he’s got his points.”

-

_The problem is, Amras does remember past Christmases, remembers them as vividly as he lived them._

_Candles in the frosted windows and red berries strung about garlands and pine. Laughing games, reels and jigs across the wooden floors, and small packages done up in brown paper and twine, spattered over with Mamaí’s stolen bright paints._

_What else?_

_A fine Irish voice beneath dark hair and a proud brow as quick to rise in amusement as in anger. A finer Irish fiddle—Maglor demanding praise and pie in a breath, and Caranthir, flushed with happiness for once, obliging in the latter but not the former. Celegorm, sweeping in with snow and firewood and a winter-clear heart. Curufin, sneaking then as sneaking now, but only for a bit of cider, the cup placed by Maitimo’s plate, and Maitimo, home at last, winking across the table at Amrod wiggling in his chair over the whispered promise of a midnight skate._

_Amrod._ Amrod _._

_There is no way to ring the world round with time so that it begins again. What is gone is gone and what is to come is worse than the journey West, for it shall be done half alone. Amras will never sit at his mother’s knee again, shoulder to jostling shoulder with his twin, listening to the tale of Christmastide._

_He closes his eyes now, clasps one hand in the other, and pretends he is complete again, a mischievous boy creeping down the stairs, gripping Amrod tight and whispering loudly that he must shut up and stop breathing lest Athair discover them mid-sneak._

_Athair, or worse, Caranthir! It was his and Mamaí’s leftover pudding they were tempted to steal, the last remnant of a joyous meal, and Caranthir got so angry when Celegorm threatened to eat every last bite himself._

_So—sneak, sneak, tiptoe on and down the step and around the curl of the last bannister post and then—it was Maitimo who found them with the dawn, curled up on the kitchen floor, an empty serving platter at their feet and crumbs besmirching their new fine-woven nightshirts. It was he who gently unhooked their arms about each other’s neck, he who wiped their lips clean, and he who lied softly to Caranthir, taking all the blame upon himself._

_Maitimo had always been a good hand at gift-giving, whether the day was Christmas or a birthday or anywhere in between._

_Amras, gazing into the dark-sprawling night just across the lake, wishes he could give gifts half so well-suited and kind._

_He hadn’t thought of it at the time, but Maitimo’s lie that stormy morning was not merely a gift to Ambarussa—Caranthir, always a bit ridiculous with the treasureful meanings he attached to everything, would have been a miserable walking thorn patch for_ weeks _if he thought any brother but his eldest had eaten the last of the pudding._

_The way it turned out, Caranthir had only huffed a little, then ducked his head sharped as a red-combed rooster and asked if Maitimo wanted some to be sent back to the city with him._

_“Chanticleer,” Curufin muttered through a mouthful of raisin bun._

_“Thought I would have to beg it off you,” came the Maitimo answer. “Throw in some of whatever Curufin is stuffing his face with as well, and I’ll give you a kiss.”_

_“No thank you,” Caranthir had said, so quickly it could almost have been termed a retort, but his face flushed happy, and his gleaming eyes betraying the downturn of his lip._

_Maitimo—before the world fell to rot—could make anyone glow. He was a regular matchstick._

_Amras, years and losses away from the hungry, scruffy fox kit he had been that Christmas, feels keenly his own inadequacy. Nonetheless, he has done_ some _good. Mollie has a friend now, for one, and following her advice, Amras has something tucked away in his jacket pocket, something he has spent days preparing._

_Now, he just needs a little courage._

-

It is a clear and cloudless morning, blue sky from one horizon to the other, from tree to tree, with Mithrim settled underneath. Sticks is upset again, just when she most shouldn’t be. She grips her plaited hair and kicks her shoe against the woodpile, kicks it so hard that one log leaps aside, revealing a black furry little spider that freezes, drawing its bramble legs close up against its body.

Sticks, aching now in her big toe, is feeling testy on too many accounts to feel pity for the inoffensive creature. She picks up the log and drops it back in its original place. The spider might be dead, squashed like the nose of that one fellow who don’t seem to have no brain—Homer, that’s what as he is called.

On the other hand, the spider might be alive. Sticks isn’t bothered.

“What are you doing?”

Sticks swivels on her heel and sees Russandol’s dullest brother standing in the doorway to the kitchens, looked like a frosted haystack in his be-floured brown shirt.

“Kicking logs, ain’t you got eyes?”

Frog is missing _again_ , and generally she wouldn’t fret no more, not like he needs constant watching with them gone from the Mountain and his boulder-crushing boots and all his rattlesnake guns and their peering eyes and bear-trap hands. Today, though, is special.

 _It’s Christmas tomorrow_ , said Estrela last night, brushing Sticks with some kindle-warm memory, something she can’t see exactly, but feels just as she can feel a hug with her eyes squeezed shut and her hands pressed over her ears. _In the morning, could you help me get Frog washed up?_

The asking is not one of the things bothering Sticks. It’s just Frog isn’t the only thing amissing, lots of good folk what should be free and happy like Sticks has been feeling of late, but they can’t be because they aren’t here, one way or another, not fully.

(Thralls Sticks knew, thralls she knows. And beyond that, a beautiful distant word, like an early bird-cry across a cold valley, or a star winking behind a cloud— _Mutti_.)

“Well?” she says, her voice cutting the silence like it is rock hard bread she needs to divide and ration.

Caranthir uncrosses his arms and goes to gather up a few logs.

(Sticks sees the spider jump up onto his sleeve, but she has not yet completed her judgment. She does not give warning.)

“If you tumble over the woodpile,” Caranthir says, voice muffled behind a mound of the freshest cut oak, “you must re-stack it yourself.”

“That’s natural,” Sticks says scornfully. “Like I don’t know it.”

She hears a faint hum and whisks a glance to the edge of the courtyard, out where the path down to the garden begins, and there she sees a tiny brown heel—shoeless, of _course_ —vanish behind a scrubby bush.

Caranthir, meanwhile, marches stolidly back to his kitchen.

He _does_ look like a red and black beetle about the face, and is crunchy-shelled in his words, but he hasn’t ever been mean to her or Frog or Estrela. Also, Russandol seems to like him, really and truly.

Sticks pokes her head in the door and is very nigh derailed from her purpose by the sweet warm smell of rising bread.

“You got any traps?” she says after a moment, speaking over the growl in her belly. “I need one for a hopper.”

Caranthir, arranging logs in an iron black cookstove, only grunts discouragingly, but in the end he gives her three raisins.

Sticks carefully flicks the spider from his elbow when he has his back turned.

-

_“It’s finished,” Amras says, turning his handiwork over slowly so that Mollie might see it well. “The ears don’t look quite right, but I expect Sticks will find fault with it no matter what. She’s that type.”_

_Mollie is clutching her shawl close about her shoulders, even though the air is not more cold than Mithrim-reasonable. At least she isn’t clawing at it with nervous fingers._

_They’re out in the stables of course. Mollie likes that best, not being around many people, and Amras sees to it she can spend as much time there as she likes, unharrassed._

_“Are you well?” Amras’ question is not unusual—it spills from his care every sight of her._

_“I am,” Mollie says, and he does not think she is lying today._

_“Good.”_

_Outside the barn, Huan barks deep and happy, and Mollie shifts towards the shadows under the loft, towards dusty rakes and spare boards stacked flat and long. She is still rather wary of Celegorm. When she speaks again, however, her words do not concern herself at all._

_“It is a pretty little thing,” she says. “As you say often—cunning. I think she will like it very much.”_

_-_

“One if you come out of there,” Sticks bargains. She doesn’t fancy getting scratched by Frog _and_ by the sticking, pricking fingers of whatever sun-and-cold shriveled bush Frog has twisted himself into.

Frog crawls out. So far so decent. He is making a quick, raspy, buzzing sound, repeated over and over, sort of like grasshopper wings when they fly.

Sticks is disgusted. It isn’t even grasshopper _season_.

“You nibbled that up quick,” Sticks says. “Hop along with me, and I’ll give you another.”

Frog hops, hops his quivering brown nose right into the knee of Little Red, who towers over the path with his hands behind his back.

“Careful, little rabbit,” Amras says, but it is too late.

He’s ruined everything, because Frog starts to cry and Sticks has to give him the second raisin before she meant to, and then when she turns around to continue luring her hesitant prey toward his doom, _she_ runs into Amras, though at a significantly higher height.

It’s about the last damn straw.

“I already got me a shadow,” she snaps, jabbing her finger at the dark figure stretched across the dirt path. “Ain’t no reason for me t’take you on, too.”

“I’m sorry,” Amras says, and it isn’t pleasant to see a freckled coppertop hanging his head in apology, not on a day that Estrela says is supposed to be only of good cheer, so Sticks does what she does best, gets crispier with her words, cracking them swiftly like dead wood in the coldest of winters.

“Don’t need your sorry, unless it can turn into a fresh biscuit, melting with butter. Frog likes those.” Sticks tosses her braids with her empty hand and lowers the other hand so Frog can catch a glimpse of the last raisin. “Come along, Frog, come along,” she sings softly, “and when we get to Estrela you can show her this pretty, dried up sweet, and then you can gobble it up like all the rest.”

“Gobble,” Frog says, wiping his eyes and padding forward on his hands and knees. “I eat it now.”

“Sticks,” Amras says, his brows crooked up, his not-quite-grey-enough eyes as pleading as his tone. Why does he stand like a fool overseer, with his hands behind his back, just hiding a whip or a beater?

Sticks leans over Frog. “Stand on your toes, little gobbler, and if you can be a boy instead of a critter for five minutes, I won’t tell Estrela where I last seen you hide your moccasins.”

Frog leaps right up, proving Sticks still knows what gets him best.

Amras, meanwhile, shifts back and forth from one big shoe to the other.

(His legs are stupidly long, for a boy of fourteen—he’s taller than some thralls ever got to be.)

Sticks clenches her teeth together. Amras has brought one hand back into sight, and he plays with the hem of his dark blue shirt.

“Can we just talk a minute?” His voice is sort of lost-feather-like, pretty and stiff even if it’s born of a vulture.

“Good Lord,” Sticks says, “now you want to chatter. Can’t you see I’ve got—” She pauses for a minute, recollecting his razor remark from yesterday, the one that peeled up her skin in irritation. Oblations, she is almost—but not quite enough—sure. “I’m busy,” she says instead, and scurries Frog up the path as quick as she can.

She doesn’t look back.

-

_“Mamaí, Mamaí,”Amras and Amrod had cried, scampering to her and catching their little claws in her skirt as if they were tumbling thorn bushes, or kittens in need of kneading._

_“What is it my darlings?” Mamaí lifted her head from where it had lain on the rough kitchen table, and her face was flushed under her knotted red hair, her cheeks slick with something like sweat._

_Amrod himself was weeping, and Amras was all a stutter._

_“Cru-fin says—no presents—none.”_

_“God help me,” Mamaí exclaimed, and then Curufin was scolded, but gently, and Ambarussa were cuddled, and promised that no matter if Athair was back for Christmas, there would be little gifts found in their stockings._

_She held true to her word, or perhaps Maitimo helped her—precious handfuls of chestnuts, not to share, and curious pinecone creations iced at the tips with white paint and clothed in little felt jackets and hats._

_Many years later, while crouched under a juniper tree, shaving down a block of wood, Amras does_ not _wonder where the scraps for the clothing came from. He shies from the hazy recall of his first memorable Christmas, the first Christmas he spent without Athair (but not the last), and instead he wonders how he will ever get through the next week as only Amras._

 _He hopes not one single person will try to give him_ anything _._

-

Estrela can work miracles, now that no Mountain has got her in his shadow, now that she has all the soap and heated water she could want, and so both Sticks and Frog are as clean as a Gwindor whistle for Christmas dinner. She’s even rustled up a twice-hemmed fir-green skirt for Sticks, and though Sticks feels a bit awkward, she sort of likes how it twirls down at the bottom when she twists round on her ankle real quick.

Also, it gives her satisfaction when she traipses into the hall with her shoulders straight and her chin high, and more than one person says she looks very fine.

Sticks by far does not remember ever having a meal like this, a feast, as Estrela says. She steals glances at Russandol in between bites of warm ham and sun-orange potatoes. He’s far down the table from her, looking shockingly alive, what with him sitting up on his own, his hair shining in candlelight.

Amras, on the other hand, is rather more ghost-like. He doesn’t say much the whole feast, and he eats hardly nothing at all, just fiddles with his knife and the handle of his tin cup.

(She _only_ notices because she’s keeping a relaxed watch on Frog, who is seated next to Amras until he is isn’t. Little Red is none of _her_ business.)

After the Frog commotion ends, and he pops up safe and hungry next to Russandol, Sticks carefully asks Wachiwi to give her a piece of Caranthir’s orange and raisin soda bread. There’s not a thing in the world she can compare it to, having never had such a treat, and she tears it into tiny pieces as she eats it, to draw out the pleasure.

Amras takes a slice too, but it goes to terrible waste. He doesn’t even half finish the bread. Instead, he drops it to his plate and rises from the bench, not even bothering to wipe his mouth. No one—almost no one, notices him leave the dining hall.

Sticks waits a while, and then she too sneaks away.

She’s seen that ill, particular pained look before, too often to count.

For once, it is on a different face.

-

_He’s alone on the shore, not one soul to comfort him. Amrod he longs for, an arm about his shoulder and a warm knock, temple against temple, and maybe a few fierce words and a little tussle, before all subsides into peace._

_The wind strikes gently against the glass of the lantern, and carries on._

_“How do I tell them? How do I make my place, and show them they can rely on me as more than just a boy?” Amras asks. “It’s been over half a year since I didn’t have to speak to be understood. None of them know me like you do. Did.”_

_The lake is close to still, and just as silent. Amras has held his hands clasped together for at least five minutes. He cannot quite trick himself into believing Amrod’s fingers are the ones wrapped so long about his knuckles, but he breathes easier nonetheless._

_Breathes easier, and then the footsteps approach._

-

Quite a difference, leaving the close air of the dining hall, the bodies pressed side by side on the long benches, and stepping out into the fresh winter night just back of the kitchen. Sticks could throw her arms about and whirl round and round and not hit anyone at all, she could cry out anything she wanted without fear of being silenced. It is a strange feeling to know the latter to be true.

She wonders if Estrela has discovered this freedom yet. Russandol hasn’t.

Down by the black water lake, a single light, a lantern flame, glows orange and sad. Just one small flicker under the rising moon.

 _None of my business_ , Sticks thinks, scratching an itch at the base of her neck.

Behind her, in the long building half encircling Sticks, warm laughter plays about and voices and mugs jumble and clink together.

Amras is none of her business, only here she already stands. Sighing, Sticks makes her descent.

-

_Amras would like to run. Somewhere no one knows who he is, so that he will not have to see his own grief reflected in everyone’s eyes. If this is Caranthir, fumbling his way down in the dark, they will just sit together trying to aid one another as uselessly as they rode out that night two lost brothers ago._

_If this is Celegorm—_

_No. A stolen glance says otherwise._

_It’s the sandpiper girl, small and fearsome._

-

It is awful surprising and surprisingly awful how Little Red and Russandol can both fold themselves up all child-like. Why, Amras practically looks like Frog, the way he draws his knees up to his chest. He sits all hunched over, one hand gripping the other, pressed against his forehead, and the lantern casts eerie light upon his curved spine. If his half-shadow figure starts rocking back and forth or side to side, Sticks will have to give him a shove.

“You sick?”

Amras doesn’t startle at her approach or her sudden speech, so either he heard her picking her way down the path or he is thinking bad, bad thoughts and doesn’t care that he has been discovered. Some thralls used to be like that, when hunger and cruelty grew too familiar and heavy.

They usually died soon after.

Sticks could pat the top of Amras’s fox-fur hair as she walks by, so close she is. What care does she have though, to comfort him in that way? None.

Besides, his lips are stitched together still, and his silence pricks at her restless fingertips.

She steps past, tugging a lock of hair behind his ear, just to test what he’ll do.

Amras only leans away.

That don’t seem right at all.

Sticks sits crosslegged a foot from the edge of the lake, which licks at the shore as delicately as Jib washing her babies. She doesn’t look at the red-haired boy behind her, just tucks her skirt over her stockings.

“It’s a fool’s night,” she says. She scrabbles at the dirt beside her knee and digs up a little stone. It lies cold in her palm. “Bet you don’t know why.”

“Should I?” Amras’s voice is smaller than a hayseed.

Sticks feels a little stiff in her shoulders. Pulling carrots is work, but nothing like what she knew before Mithrim.

“Guess not,” she replies. “It’s the kind of night where, back at the—back where I used to—well, sometimes the moon playing in between clouds gave ideas to folks. Made ‘em see a plan what could never work, so they’d run, as if the shiny light in the sky was a friend that would shut its eye when the Bad Ones came after ‘em.”

Something makes a plopping sound out in the water. Sticks doesn’t know if it is a fish, or maybe a brown duck, if that sort of thing lives near Mithrim, or some sort of hunting bird. Maybe a real frog.

Amras hasn’t moved, as far as Sticks’ ears can tell, but when he speaks, his words ache the mottled hues of a bad bruise, dull purple and yellow.

“Do you think I’m a fool?”

“Sure,” Sticks says. “That’s certain as sunrise.”

Another plop. Sticks considers tossing the stone in her hand, to see if it’ll skip.

Amras is skipping his breath, or she’s gone full deaf. It’d be a hell of a lot easier to talk to him if he weren’t half of Russandol.

“Look here,” she says, scrambling to her feet, shoving the stone into her pocket. “You might be running but I don’t know what from, and sometimes that’s all you can do. I ain’t gonna judge that.” She brushes off her simple skirt and steals a backward glance, only to catch silver moonlight glinting off Amras’ teary cheek in the moment before he hurriedly rubs it dry with the cuff of his sleeve.

She looks away then, curling a finger anxiously in one of her braids, and mutters about returning to the fort, but Amras interrupts her.

“You’ve seen really horrid things, I suppose. Devils at work.”

He isn’t crying anymore, just looking up at her earnestly. In the moonlight, she can’t pick out his freckles.

“I guess,” Sticks says, nodding solemnly. “Devils.” She doesn’t know why she repeats him, only it’s easier to do that than to say much else. She doesn’t know what her problems have to do with his, and she wasn’t planning to contemplate on whip-harrowed skin, metal-sliced mouths, or girls stumbling out of the overseers’ barracks, with nowhere safe for them to go except the earth.

Amras’s eyebrows pinch and he nods. “Mollie said as you might. Said you might not have any memory of kindness, or a—a home.” His voice catches on the last word.

“Mollie thinks she knows an awful lot,” Sticks says, a little disgruntled. “She don’t know everything though. I had a Ma once.” She cannot give away the precious name of _Mutti_. She never even told that to Frog.

Amras breathes quite quickly now, but the in and out of it is thin like a fragile sheet of ice, ready to shatter at the flick of a finger. He looks very small here, huddled at Sticks’ feet. He bites his lip.

“So did I.” 

Up at the fort, the distant noise of revelry rises and falls.

Sticks grasps her own arms and sinks back to the ground, throat dry and sore as her knuckles.

Over the lake, something dark lifts and whooshes away on soft wings, leaving the lonely to their grief.

Neither Sticks nor Amras speak more of their mothers, or anyone else they may have lost. They sit side by side for some time, a scrawny little girl and a boy whose extra years and height mean little in a world that takes and takes and takes.

“Any reason you been ‘voiding me?”

“Avoiding you? I haven’t.”

“Been running away like I was a striped skunk whenever you seen me. Don’t lie.”

“Sorry. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Sticks thinks, sure it doesn’t, but she only rolls her eyes.

-

_“If just one of you will cooperate,” Amras complains to the kittens, arranging Spot so she lies curled up against his knee. “This is very important.”_

_Spot leaps up again and skitters away from his hand, running pink nose first into Tig-Pig’s side. The kittens begin to bat at each other with their tiny paws._

_Amras sighs. “I will say, you are very like her.”_

_Something drops heavy into the hay from the barn loft above. It is Jib, but she does not linger near her brawling litter. Amras watches as she sashays away, tail flicking in disdain._

_He shakes his head. “You’re no help at all.”_

-

“You did not,” Sticks protests, shivering a little. The moon has gone under a cloud, and she pulls the lantern up to her side, so that its frail flame might stave off complete darkness. The grass and sand and stone beneath her are quite cold.

Amras’s profile glows golden now.

“I’ve swum it,” he says. “Maybe not across the farthest points, but I did it once. It isn’t that difficult, if you are a good swimmer and have a steady head on your shoulders.”

He is talking of the lake, boasting rather. Sticks, who does not know how to tread water, let alone paddle a stroke, makes no further comment.

She pulls a face, a haughty grimace. “If you could just plant as well as you swim, maybe the garden rows wouldn’t be so crooked.”

Amras knocks her shoulder gently with the side of his arm. “That wasn’t my fault,” he protests.

“Leave off me,” Sticks says, but her jaw is not tight nor does her skin prickle. She shoves Amras right back.

Amras only continues to make excuses for himself. “The organization of rows wasn’t my charge, though I did tell Caranthir he was seeding at angles. He was terribly vexed to find I was right.”

-

_It is easier than Amras thought, talking to Sticks. She isn’t Mollie, true, but even so, he finds the words coming without labor. Though she insults and questions him at every turn, he finds he does not mind it. Perhaps he can tell she means no real cruelty, stabs at him without bitterness or calculating force. Perhaps her several lesser years soften him—he is, after all, about to turn fifteen. He is in the first years of manhood, and she is but a child._

_But a child, and yet, she came from the same hell Maitimo did. That makes Amras respect her._

_“How old are you?” he asks at last._

_She flicks her braid behind her shoulder and says, “Don’t know.”_

_Amras is ashamed, but he is also suffering. “Do you remember your birthday?”_

_Sticks just looks at him, one brow clearly raised high in the flamelight, and Amras turns away._

_Many years ago, a few days following Christmas, a pair of twins had slipped into the wide world and their mother’s weary arms. Entangled evermore like vines, so they had lived, until they were separated by the cruelest shears._

_Ask me, he wishes at Sticks. Ask me, because no one else remembers. Don’t ask me, because I don’t want anyone to know how angry I feel._

_Angry?_

_No. Only miserable, and so very alone._

-

The evening chill finally conquers Sticks. She hadn’t meant to let it defeat her, because if Amras could stand it so could she, but her teeth have begun to chatter, and all she can think of is finding a fire and perhaps Estrela’s arms, and maybe giving one last word good night to Russandol, if he has not retired.

She shifts now, trying to think of an excuse, so that Amras might not believe her weak, but he, who has not spoken for some few minutes, chooses now to talk.

“Sticks,” he says, looking at her furtively out of the corner of his eye. The lantern light catches there, a sparking glow like cigarette ash. He is nervous about something. Or at least, if Russandol bore such a look, that’s what it would mean.

“What,” Sticks says, a bit whiplike. She should have snatched up a shawl upon leaving the dining hall. Maybe shouldn’t have _left_ the dining hall.

“You like the kittens, don’t you?”

Of all the fool questions.

“No,” Sticks says pulling her knees up to her chest.

Amras is now the one sitting with his legs crossed. His boots don’t look near enough as soft and warm as her moccasins.

“No, I can’t bear the kittens, and that’s why as I like to hold ‘em and let ‘em rub their baby heads on my chin, and why I named one of ‘em careful like when you said as I could.”

“It was just a question,” Amras says, sniffing, but maybe without meaning to something flickers at the corner of his lips. A smile, not a Russandol smile, but something noticeable anyway. Something a little peppery, not quite as mournful and dear.

“I’m going to bed,” Sticks announces, but before she can push herself to her feet, Amras shoves something small and wooden into her hands.

“What’s this?”

Amras says, “Look yourself,” and Sticks does. He has passed on a figure, wood carved and whittled down into the rather cunning shape of a small cat, one that lies with its haunches bunched up, its tail tucked around its belly, and its head tilted in a curious glance.

Holding it close by the lantern, Sticks can see that the work is remarkable. If she were to set it on the shore of the lake, she wouldn’t be surprised to see it leap up and chase the scent of a mouse.

“A kitten,” she says.

“It’s for you,” Amras mumbles hurriedly. “A Christmas present.” He can’t seem to decide whether to look at Sticks or at the reflection of the moon on the lake, which has just made its reappearance. “It wasn’t just my idea, though, so if you don’t like it...” His voice trails off.

Sticks is nonplussed. What is she supposed to do or say? “I already got one of these,” she says. “A real live one, that can eat and sleep and keep pests out of the barn. This cat don’t even have soft fur.”

She holds the figure in the palm of her hand and strokes the smooth back with one finger.

Amras blinks and shrugs his shoulders. “You can have a real cat _and_ a toy one,” he says.

“A toy?” Sticks asks. She tickles the chin of the wooden kitten, and is delighted to find it is a little rougher there. Feels like Spot’s prickle tongue. She squints and turns the figurine over and over, lifts it so that it is dark against the moon.

She is silent too long.

“I knew you wouldn’t like it,” Amras says, scrambling to all six feet of his height or wherever the tiptop of his head reaches. “Here.” He leans over Sticks and extends a hand. “Give it back and I’ll just—I’ll burn it.”

Sticks glares up at him. “Hold on,” she snaps. “Don’t get all rotten wood wobbly now. Mebbe I just need some learning is all. What do I do with it?”

Amras stares, and his answer is half a question. “You play with it? Like a doll?”

Back in the thrall camp, if she could steal a little time for herself late in the evening or early in the morn, Sticks used to tie straw together into little people.

It never felt safe to pretend they were her and Frog, venturing off unrestrained, with no one to grab their wrists or to curse them with oaths. Instead, she would silently name the straw people for the thralls who _did_ leave their slavery behind forever, dying in the hot fields or wailing under the lash or wasting away in their makeshift beds. Then, whenever and wherever she could, she would scrape up a little bit of earth, and lay them to rest, accompanied by a leaf, a poky brown nut, or even a mere oddly shaped rock, if that is all she could find or entice Frog to fetch.

Amras does not know that she knows what a doll is. The innocent horror on his face tells her so.

“My, if you don’t know a joke when it slaps you across the face.” Sticks laughs, but she sounds reedy and weak even to her own ears.

She holds the wooden kitten close against her chest and strokes its forehead with one small finger.

“It don’t purr,” she says, because she’d only lie for Frog and Russandol and Estrela, “but I still kinda like it. You try to burn it, and I’ll shove you in after.”

-

_Amras watches as Sticks cradles his gift. She is a girl of extremes, and he doesn’t rightly know how to take her. She’s got Aredhel’s fire, sure and certain, but what he doesn’t know is if she would hide how she hated a gift she received. Aredhel wouldn’t. He sort of thinks Sticks wouldn’t either._

_When Sticks suddenly shifts the wooden cat away from him, out of his vision, and leans her head down real quick, he falls into a certainty, and with that, warmth rushes to his chest unexpectedly._

_“You’ll have to name her,” he says. “If you need help choosing—”_

_Sticks cuts him off, leaping to stand beside him. “She’s already got a name.”_

_Amras waits, thinking of Spot and Red and Tig-Pig._

_Sticks tucks the kitten closer in her arms and turns away, starting up the path. Just when Amras wonders if she is purposefully taunting him, she calls out, “Margaret. Pretty, isn't it?”_

_She doesn't wait to hear his answer, but scurries up to the fort as quickly as if it were broad daylight._

_Amras shakes his head._

_It is only to be expected, from one as strange as Sticks. He wonders why she always surprises him._

_When she is vanished from sight, Amras stands for a while, irresolute. The lake has done what it could for him, been a silent listening entity that allowed him to spill his grief, but nothing more. Nevertheless, he is, for now, of lighter heart._

_One day, he will ask Maitimo to tell him more of Sticks. Or maybe—maybe he will ask Sticks herself._


End file.
